High Old Times Live at Fullerton Airport : Camaraderie: Retired aviators gather daily at taxiway restaurant to share coffee and memories of the days when pilots went where they darn well pleased.

Almost every day of the week since 1957, they’ve been coming to the family restaurant at Fullerton Municipal Airport for the conversation and a cup of coffee.

In the 1950s, they were three young aviators who took a morning break from flying by grabbing a table in the middle of the dining room to swap stories.

Today, Jim McGee, Ira Brummell and Bob Rack are retired but continue to meet for talk of airplanes, politics or personal finance because it is a therapeutic way of spending free time in their golden years, they say.

“There’s a simple analogy,” McGee, a 62-year-old former corporate pilot, said as he sat next to the others at Tartuffles Restaurant. “My father and grandfather in the Midwest used to get together at the grocery store near a big potbellied stove. This is a similar situation, only to a higher degree.”

In 1946, McGee was a 16-year-old Fullerton High School student who worked as a gas boy at the airport. To relax, he stopped by the restaurant, then a popular hangout for pilots. He returned off and on through the years.

In 1957, Brummell, 65, was a real estate developer with projects all across California. After parking his twin-engine Cessna, he’d join fellow pilot Rack to talk “politics, flying and girls.” Both come back, often five or six days a week.

“A common interest in aviation is the only thing that brings us down here,” said Rack, 60, a former flight instructor for the airport. “Nobody was invited in. It just evolved like osmosis. It just happened.”

Through the years, ex-pilots from a variety of professional backgrounds, ranging from architecture to chemistry, dentistry, financial investment and plumbing, as many as 15 at a time, have joined in.

What has developed is something akin to “a floating poker game,” said airport director Roland Elder. “You come in at 7 a.m. and find one group of people,” he said. “At 10 a.m., there might be a different group.”

“It’s the only thing that keeps me alive,” said Chet Sowinski, 71, of Placentia, a former World War II pilot whose wife recently suffered a stroke.

“If I stayed at home I’d be climbing the walls,” Sowinski said. “It’s a relief to come over and relax. We talk about everything in the world except what’s going on at home: finances, cars, airplanes.”

Rack, confined to a wheelchair since he was found to have multiple sclerosis in 1980, says he and the others have grown bitter over the federal government’s multiplying rules governing airspace. The group also perceives a loss of freedom which limits recreational pilots from flying as they please.

“The outlook’s changed,” he said as he sat facing the airport taxiway. “There are so many restrictions we just shake our heads in wonderment now.”

“Younger pilots today don’t hold the same animosity toward the bureaucracy that we do,” Rack continued. “They were raised with it. We remember what it was like when flying was fun.”

“Flying is getting so restrictive,” said Brummell.

“It’s like asking your mother if you can go out and play,” chimed Ed Cogan, a 72-year-old book distributor who flew combat gliders over England and France in 1941. “It’s not like the old days when you could just get in a plane and go. It takes a certain amount of finesse to follow all those procedures.”

Galen Leerhoof, a 63-year-old Placentia resident who never piloted again after a stroke paralyzed his left arm in 1983, sat nearby listening.

He took a sip of coffee and a puff from his cigarette before trying to explain the group’s appeal. “No membership, no dues, we just congregate to throw the bull.”